On November 18^th I attended a floor program held by my floor’s RA, Julie Eller. The program did not have a name, but it required each resident, as well as a few non-residents, to draw herself as a true-to-scale Barbie doll using regular printer paper and some colored pencils. The rest of the residents and I sat together in the common room as we drew ourselves and colored in what would be ourselves as Barbies, and then each of us had a picture taken with our respective doll, which will later be hung up on a wall in our common room.

The mission of this program was to bring to people’s attention the inaccuracy of Mattel Barbie’s body shape and size, and the detrimental effect this morphed body image has on the minds of small children who grow up playing with Barbie. Young children who play with a doll of seemingly ‘perfect’ proportions have their expectations of themselves set unrealistically high, which will affect them later in life and result in a morphed body image and low self-esteem, among other negative mental effects. Our floor’s RA, Julie, plans on taking a picture of each resident with her realistically-drawn doll and sending these pictures to the Mattel company in order to get the company to begin manufacturing dolls that are more realistic and of humanly normal features and proportions.

Elizabeth Schmidt

Second Blog Post

On October 18, 2014, I completed my second volunteer activity as required by the Honors Program. The activity I participated in was ‘An Afternoon of Service’ hosted by McKenzie. It began at 12pm and ended a little past 3pm, and it took place in Meeting Room 5 in the Campus Center.

The large room was made up of four round tables and some folding chairs at each one. Every table was a station, and at each station there was a different service project that I and the rest of the volunteers would be completing during the three hours of our ‘Afternoon of Service’ with the Honors Program. We each started out at a certain project and were allowed to switch tables whenever we felt like we needed a change in crafts. Some of the activities included teddy bear making for children in hospitals, wreath making for families’ homes in the Ronald McDonald House organization, and making pumpkin decorations out of construction paper.

I began at a table that was making dog toys out of old t-shirts for animal shelters, an activity that I have experience with since I did it once before at the Honors Overnight Experience back in June of this year. This was fairly easy, as we merely had to cut strips of material and then braid three pieces together to create a rope toy. When my friends and I had exhausted the bag of donated clothes at the dog toy station, we moved on to the peanut butter and jelly sandwich making activity. Here we helped bag up the sandwiches and clean up the station once all of the bread slices had been used. Since we had run out of supplies at this station, we all moved onto the coloring book station, where we spent the rest of our afternoon coloring pictures for soldiers and creating coloring books for children in hospitals.

This service project was very rewarding, as I was able to spend time with my friends on a Saturday afternoon while doing crafts and helping to make someone else’s day a little brighter. If there is ever another ‘Afternoon of Service’ available, I will definitely make a point to join in on the volunteering and help out again.

On September 6^th I participated in the Stockton Day of Service for the first time. Beginning at 8 in the morning, the Day of Service volunteers gathered in the Campus Center for a brief check-in and then formed groups of various sizes inside the event room. Each group had a different destination (on- or off-campus) and was run by a different organization, but each one had the same goal in mind: to help our community by giving our time and effort toward those in need.

A sign at one of the tables in the event room caught my eye: Christian Ministries Thrift Store. I have never been in a thrift shop before and I was automatically interested in seeing what it might be like, so I chose to volunteer with that group for the day. When the volunteers and I arrived at the store in Northfield, we began our day of service by hanging baskets down the aisles and along the ceiling. Later we moved on to clearing shelves, dusting them off, and then bringing VHS movies to the front of the store for better visibility. We made sure to keep the Disney movies down low for small children to easily see. Once we had finished all of the jobs that the store clerk had initially given us, we began a general organization of the store by putting similar items together to make for a better presentation of the merchandise. We did this for the remainder of the day.

I generally enjoyed the fact that I spent my day at this thrift store helping the elderly store clerk complete these tasks because she wouldn’t have been able to do them on her own. However, I took something else away from Stockton’s Day of Service as well: the items in this store are things that I have in my home and down in my basement, never to be used again. When I saw how the costumers purchasing these items truly needed them to help make their lives easier, I realized how fortunate I am to actually have the problem of ‘excess’ anything. I’m a million times more grateful for what fortune I have in my life now that I’ve volunteered at this thrift shop, and now I will definitely think of donating before throwing something out that could possibly be needed desperately by someone.